How To Crop Video On Your Mac

You don't need a third-party app to crop video on your Mac. But neither QuickTime Player nor iMovie will do it either. Here's how to use the built-in Photos app to actually crop your video and export a new version.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can crop video on your Mac without using any third party apps.
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Now there're a lot of posts and tutorials out there that will claim to show you how to crop a video on your Mac. But most of them are just for third party apps promoting those apps as a way to do it. Sure, you can download and use a third party app or you can use Apple's own Final Cut Pro to do it. So before I show you the right way to do it let me explain why Quick Time Player won't work and neither will iMovie.
In Quick Time Player a lot of times people will tell you, oh yeah you can crop video here and then what they point you to is under Edit, Trim. Trimming is not cropping. That is just taking some time off the beginning and end of the video. Cropping is when you want a section of the video, like a rectangle in the middle, and you want to get rid of the things on the left, right, top, and bottom. 
But how about iMovie. Surely iMovie can do it. In fact if you bring the video into iMovie and put it by itself in a timeline there is even a tool here called Cropping. If you select that you can select Fit, Crop to Fill, or Ken Burns. Ken Burns kind of animates it. Crop to Fill would be the way to go and sure enough when you select that you can see the four corners here and you could drag them and actually crop the video. So, what's wrong with this? Well, what it does is it will enlarge the section of the video that you selected. When you go to Share and Export it as a file you will still be exporting it as, say, a 1080 video which this was. So while you're zooming in on a section of the video you're not actually going to change the dimensions of the video. It's just going to be an enlarged portion of it at the same size. In this case 1080. Furthermore you can't change the ratio. So if I want this to be, say, square I can't really do that in iMovie. There are some work arounds and some complex ways to get that done. But, for the most part you can't easily crop video in iMovie. 
So how do you do it? Well, you use another app that comes with your Mac. The Photos App. Now this might seem a little weird because Photos is of course for photos. But it does handle videos as well. One of the things that the Photos App does is Crop either photos or video. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this video file into Photos. Now if I don't want to make it a permanent part of my Photos Library that's fine. I can delete it right after I export the cropped version. So I"m going to drag this in and you can see it switches to the Imports View to show me the imported video. I can access it there just as easily as in the Library. It's real easy to see it right here. If I double click on it I'm now in Viewing Mode. So I can view the video. 
If I click Edit at the top right I can now edit the video. Now most of the editing ability for videos is new in macOS Ventura. So if you have an older version of macOS you won't see this until you update. You can see here I've got Adjust, Filters, and Crop. So I could actually apply things like Light and Color Adjustment here or put it through a filter, if I want. But I'm just going to use the Cropping here. With the cropping tool I crop it just like I would crop a photo. So I can drag the corners, like this. If I wait a second it will kind of zoom into that area. I could also push out with the corners like that. I can Revert to Original anytime I want. I can also go and select an Aspect Ratio. So, for instance, if I want it to be square I can actually select that and now the corners will adjust but locked as a square. So now I can adjust and get the exact area I want. Then it will zoom into that so I can see it clearer. 
So let's say this is what I want to crop it to. I'll just click Done and now when I view the video in Photos it is square. But, I can also export from Photos. The easy way to do that is simply drag and drop. If I drag and drop to a Finder window, or in this case just the Desktop, I end up with my new video here. If I double click on it and open it up in Quick Time Player I can see it is indeed square. If I go to Window and then Show Movie Inspector I can see the dimensions here. 776 x 776. Square and clearly cropped down from the 1080 that the original video was. So it is actually showing the video pixel for pixel in this new file here. So true cropping of the video. 
Now you can also go to File, and then Export. If you export unmodified original you're going to get the original back. But if you export the video here then you get movie quality options. So this is where you want to be careful. In general you want to select the highest one. That will give you the result we saw before where you get the new cropped video saved in the exact pixel dimensions of your crop. If you go to something lower then what you may get is something that has fewer pixels in it. So if I say I want it 48p here and then I export and I export to the Desktop I'll get this new video here. If I open this up and go to the Movie Inspector you can see I got 480 x480 this time. So the general idea is to select something higher than your vertical resolution and then you'll just get the actual vertical resolution. If you select something lower it is going to shrink it down which may be useful but probably in most situations you want the video in the exact size in which you cropped it. 
That's it! Now that you've done that you can find that video in your Library here. I'm just going to hit the Delete Key and delete it there so it is not a part of my Library anymore. If, of course, this video was originally in your Photos Library then it makes it a lot easier because you can just go right to the cropping. You don't have to import it and you don't have to delete it when you're done. That's how you do it.Just use the Photos App that comes with your Mac. Even if you're not using the Photos App for anything else you can  just use it for this temporarily bringing in videos, cropping them as you want, and exporting them again. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Crop Video On Your Mac”

Patrick Mc Namee

9 months ago

This was short and really clear Gary - I am sure a lot of people will love this.

Jeff Pylant

Thank you, Gary. Another pro tip.

Marcia Christ

Thank you Gary! This will be great for social media posts!

Robert R

Stimulated me to crop some older U/W videos from Bahamas trip. It worked great and lead me to adjust some colors/hues using Photos which also worked very well (U/W videos have always been hard to adjust). Thanks

V J Spindler III

Uses of Photos I hadn't seen before. But I still have a computer running Catalina so I can use QuickTime Pro. This allows me to edit anywhere in the video: copy a section and make a new video clip, delete a section anywhere, etc., and all quickly and easily. Is there anything available so many years later that can do the same things?

Gary Rosenzweig

V J Spindler III: You can do that in QuickTime Player, the current one in modern macOS. See https://macmost.com/easily-trimming-video-files-with-quicktime-player.html Of course most people would do it in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or some other video editing app.

Jim Terrinoni

Very interesting. Glad you covered this topic. I have resorted to Quicktime and iMovie with a lack of satisfaction, because I don't encounter the problem often I have "let it go" and now I know the better solution to the problem (My dad's best advice: Always use the proper tool for the job, when you're done, clean your tools and put them away.") TY Gary!!!!

How To Crop Video On Your Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Crop Video On Your Mac”

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